


near and far

by sapphicish



Category: Harlots (TV)
Genre: F/F, isabella is emo for a living
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-23
Updated: 2018-08-23
Packaged: 2019-07-01 09:02:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,235
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15770904
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sapphicish/pseuds/sapphicish
Summary: “Who are you always writing to?” Sophia asks one morning, three and a half months after their departure, over breakfast, eyebrows raised when Isabella looks sharply at her over the table.





	near and far

**Author's Note:**

> i respect the harlots writers' decisions but...i'm here to make different decisions!

_Dear Charlotte,_ Isabella writes – once, twice, again and again and again until the words are burned into her memory forever. She writes it for the first time a month after she escapes. And it is strange to call it that, to think of it as that, because they had gone easily and quietly and now they are surrounded with many of the same luxuries or _more_ because she is free. They are free together. And then she thinks of how her heart beat an unsteady drumming rhythm in the presence of her brother when she'd negotiated with him; thinks of how an ugly, writhing black knot in her chest clenched when she told him that she did not hate him; thinks of how it did not relax until the door of the house in St. James's was closed behind them.

Yes. Escape is a good word, a right word.

Her hands tremble, the first time. She puts quill to parchment and sits for a long stretch of time after she writes the first two words, the words that she knows with certainty are right where nothing else is, where nothing else can be. Ink trails across the paper, black and wet, smearing on her fingers when she eventually pushes her palms forward, scrunching the parchment into a ball and thinking, childishly, _why, why, why can't I do this._

Isabella is good with words.

She has always been good with words. It is a necessity among the _beau monde._

She is not, it seems, good with words when it all comes down to one person: Charlotte Wells.

But then, she had learned that the moment Charlotte had kissed her on the cheek in Quigley's, what seems like so long ago now.

It would be better, perhaps, if she visited; but she cannot, should not, and so she does not, though she once gets as far as the door one night after waking from a nightmare where Harcourt leaves her in chains and bloody rags, before she realizes that she _cannot. Should not._ And so she does this, a series of things that comfort her: drinks enough that it sates her lingering nausea and horror, opens Sophia's door enough to watch her sleeping, curled-up form, to make sure that her chest still rises and falls, and goes back to her bedchambers.

  


_Dear Charlotte,_ she writes in the dark of night next to a dimming candle. Sophia is upstairs asleep, and she is certain of it before she pours herself a glass of wine and sits, fingers smoothing creases from a piece of parchment that has no creases. It makes her nervous, this writing, as though it is somehow a lawless and frightening thing, and far away Charlotte might sense it and –

Isabella shakes her head. The wine makes her thoughts unravel. She puts them all aside and begins a new line.

_I miss you._

In the morning, she wakes to find that ink has stained the cuffs of her gown, and she has fallen asleep at her boudoir. Isabella pulls herself together; her aching hands, her aching head, her aching heart, and she tears the letter in two.

  


“Who are you always writing to?” Sophia asks three and a half months after their departure, over breakfast, eyebrows raised when Isabella looks sharply at her over the table.

“Pardon me?”

“What,” Sophia says, mouth twitching at the corners like she has a secret; has Isabella's secret, tied up and splayed open in the palms of her hands. “Am I not allowed to know? I never see you sending any of them. Only writing, and writing, and writing. It must be exhausting.”

“No one, I am writing to no one,” Isabella murmurs absentmindedly, but then she realizes that such a lie makes her heart sting, so she goes back; fixes her mistake in the same way she cannot fix her letters because she does not know how to. “I never send them. I...cannot find the words.”

“To Miss Wells?”

Isabella blinks, startled; almost forgets that Sophia had met her, had known her for the too-brief time before—

Before everything.

“Yes,” she says, half-wary.

“Hm.” Sophia looks back down to her plate of breakfast. 

Isabella wants to ask, wants to pry after her daughter, to follow where her curiosity leads her – what has her beloved seen in this that Isabella does not—but as so many times in her life before, the fear and bemusement and embarrassment chase her wondering away, away into the darkness of her mind.

When breakfast has come to a close, Sophia circles around the table and wraps her arms around Isabella's shoulders, head pressed against her neck, lips to her cheek for a quick moment. Isabella is filled, then, with so much warmth that she thinks – fears – she may faint from it, that and the familiar relief that washes over her. No matter everything else, she is free. Free with Sophia, who is here and whole and alive and _happy,_ with her, somehow –

“Write your heart, Mother,” Sophia says next to her ear, “and she will know it. And understand it – as clearly as you and I do.”

Before Isabella can speak, perhaps to protest or to inquire or to _deny,_ Sophia is gone, pale skirts vanishing around the corner, and she sits at the table and stares at her hands and focuses on remembering how to breathe with that tight, ghastly lump in her throat.

Isabella hurries first thing to her boudoir when she is certain she can stand, nearly rips a drawer out entirely in her haste to get to the letters; counts them, one by one by one.

There are twenty-eight, and many of them consist of nothing but scattered lines and those familiar, damning words; _Dear Charlotte,_ over and over in scrawling script or shaky script or script that dissolves halfway through her name.

She tucks them all away again in little piles; and that night, burns all of them in the fire.

_I hope that you will forgive me,_ smoldering to ash in the flames.

_What I did I did not do to spite you, but to save myself and my child,_ flickering on the logs.

_Please do me the courtesy of writing back to me, and if you do not, then I will know where we stand and I will plague your life no longer,_ crumpled and tossed in amongst the rest.

_I have not been a good friend, but it is only because I do not know how;_ balled up, tight and sharp in her fists until all the edges dig mild into her skin. That goes, too, burning to nothing like the thick, heavy feeling in her chest when she drinks more wine.

Isabella sits in front of the window that same evening, stares out into the darkness of night, then dips a quill that she knows so well at this point into a bottle of ink and lets it hover, dripping, over the parchment for several long minutes – enough to feel like an hour – before she finally sets it forward.

_Write your heart,_ Sophia had told her. 

Write her heart.

It is certainly something that is easier to say and to think than to do, but Isabella refills her glass, takes a breath and drops her hand, which seems like it has never been shakier and more uncertain.

_Dear Charlotte,_ she writes.

_I am sorry._


End file.
